760 research outputs found
Perfectly Secure Steganography: Capacity, Error Exponents, and Code Constructions
An analysis of steganographic systems subject to the following perfect
undetectability condition is presented in this paper. Following embedding of
the message into the covertext, the resulting stegotext is required to have
exactly the same probability distribution as the covertext. Then no statistical
test can reliably detect the presence of the hidden message. We refer to such
steganographic schemes as perfectly secure. A few such schemes have been
proposed in recent literature, but they have vanishing rate. We prove that
communication performance can potentially be vastly improved; specifically, our
basic setup assumes independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.)
covertext, and we construct perfectly secure steganographic codes from public
watermarking codes using binning methods and randomized permutations of the
code. The permutation is a secret key shared between encoder and decoder. We
derive (positive) capacity and random-coding exponents for perfectly-secure
steganographic systems. The error exponents provide estimates of the code
length required to achieve a target low error probability. We address the
potential loss in communication performance due to the perfect-security
requirement. This loss is the same as the loss obtained under a weaker order-1
steganographic requirement that would just require matching of first-order
marginals of the covertext and stegotext distributions. Furthermore, no loss
occurs if the covertext distribution is uniform and the distortion metric is
cyclically symmetric; steganographic capacity is then achieved by randomized
linear codes. Our framework may also be useful for developing computationally
secure steganographic systems that have near-optimal communication performance.Comment: To appear in IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, June 2008; ignore
Version 2 as the file was corrupte
Perfectly Secure Steganography: Capacity, Error Exponents, and Code Constructions
An analysis of steganographic systems subject to the following perfect
undetectability condition is presented in this paper. Following embedding of
the message into the covertext, the resulting stegotext is required to have
exactly the same probability distribution as the covertext. Then no statistical
test can reliably detect the presence of the hidden message. We refer to such
steganographic schemes as perfectly secure. A few such schemes have been
proposed in recent literature, but they have vanishing rate. We prove that
communication performance can potentially be vastly improved; specifically, our
basic setup assumes independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.)
covertext, and we construct perfectly secure steganographic codes from public
watermarking codes using binning methods and randomized permutations of the
code. The permutation is a secret key shared between encoder and decoder. We
derive (positive) capacity and random-coding exponents for perfectly-secure
steganographic systems. The error exponents provide estimates of the code
length required to achieve a target low error probability. We address the
potential loss in communication performance due to the perfect-security
requirement. This loss is the same as the loss obtained under a weaker order-1
steganographic requirement that would just require matching of first-order
marginals of the covertext and stegotext distributions. Furthermore, no loss
occurs if the covertext distribution is uniform and the distortion metric is
cyclically symmetric; steganographic capacity is then achieved by randomized
linear codes. Our framework may also be useful for developing computationally
secure steganographic systems that have near-optimal communication performance.Comment: To appear in IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, June 2008; ignore
Version 2 as the file was corrupte
Unified Description for Network Information Hiding Methods
Until now hiding methods in network steganography have been described in
arbitrary ways, making them difficult to compare. For instance, some
publications describe classical channel characteristics, such as robustness and
bandwidth, while others describe the embedding of hidden information. We
introduce the first unified description of hiding methods in network
steganography. Our description method is based on a comprehensive analysis of
the existing publications in the domain. When our description method is applied
by the research community, future publications will be easier to categorize,
compare and extend. Our method can also serve as a basis to evaluate the
novelty of hiding methods proposed in the future.Comment: 24 pages, 7 figures, 1 table; currently under revie
Micro protocol engineering for unstructured carriers: On the embedding of steganographic control protocols into audio transmissions
Network steganography conceals the transfer of sensitive information within
unobtrusive data in computer networks. So-called micro protocols are
communication protocols placed within the payload of a network steganographic
transfer. They enrich this transfer with features such as reliability, dynamic
overlay routing, or performance optimization --- just to mention a few. We
present different design approaches for the embedding of hidden channels with
micro protocols in digitized audio signals under consideration of different
requirements. On the basis of experimental results, our design approaches are
compared, and introduced into a protocol engineering approach for micro
protocols.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures, 4 table
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